CANOE
John Clare Stokes
There are five points to the call of the canoe, can you name them? There is the dream of Chestnut Prospectors, then the Allusion of rapids roaring, then the Nocturnal moon dancing in flow, to the Outward bound voyage and finally the Eternity of journey.
John Clare Stokes
I take the long back way
Down the Cline Feagle lane
in the lower part of the county
Pass where Cline burned to death
In his running truck
The brick chimney marking the spot
Up the road where I see
They tore down the tenants home
Wood stacked for another’s flooring
The blooming gardenia out of place
Without a front door for balance
The way is lined with gladiolus
Red to orange variety
The old stock
At the intersection the implements sit
Rusting through yet another season
I enter the section of lined pine
Thinking I’m on some Tour de European
Slow in case a fox squirrel is crossing over
The end is nearing when at the Tabor Cemetery
Crows scold and head off toward Aldine’s
His road with the split rail and cane mill
These Feagle’s mostly a peculiar people
I resume my journey through their
Ghostly Territory.
Wondering how Shadrack ever wound up here.
Wraith of waders
he bides beside me
Through deepest glades guides
Abides in shadows
Where light slumbers
Slides to stir waters darkly
Then mysteriously departs
his blazes burning
where he lurked.
Her husband was a violinist
Not a fiddler
First chair
She had two dogs
Not big
The kind that told her
someone was knocking
With his motorcycle
A grandson holed up
Somewhere in back
Sponging from the dry
On the mantle framed
A daughter long ago killed
In a senior car wreck
Forever smiling in the prom photo
Pill bottles filling the kitchen table
Couldn’t afford to take them
And food
They tell me she passed away
In her sleep
Jigsaw never complete
Grandson in back room came
Out to tell me.
Dogs didn’t warn me.
Do the boys in gray
March off to die?
Why! Why!
This black array
Stay! Stay!
Lay thy heavy arms
Must Cain always cry?
But go the gray
from my arms
Into fields from home
to die
Wendell Berry
My old friend, the owner
of a new boat, stops by
to ask me to fish with him,
and I say I will-both of us
knowing that we may never
get around to it, it may be
years before we’re both
idle again on the same day.
But we make a plan, anyhow,
in honor of friendship
and the fine spring weather
and the new boat
and our sudden thought
of the water shining
under the morning fog.
Johnclarestokes
Years beyond my time in the garden
Some descendant of someone will
hear his father call the little one
to bring him the LRS trowel
and as another bulb is set in the soil
and the little boy returns to the nail
the LRS trowel
they will think what a fine tool it is
the little one piece relic
that fits perfectly in the hand.
The no blist’r trowel of
Luther Ray Stokes
Johnclarestokes
Mary Robinson Davis Rudd 1885-1960. My fathers first appointment to the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church was the tiny Mayberry-like town of Sopchoppy in Wakulla County in 1955. The panhandle town of under 600 was located on the banks of the crooked dark waters of the Sopchoppy River, which ran into the Oclockonee River, which ran into the Gulf at Panacea. My father preached one Sunday at Sopchoppy, then the next at the county seat of Wakulla in Crawfordville. My mother taught fourth grade at the nearby native stone school and during the day Mrs Mary kept me. Mrs Mary and Mr Emory Rudd lived next door to the church and parsonage on Rose Street in a wooden one story white cracker style house with the two front rooms off the dog trot ending in the rear kitchen. I loved the time with the Rudd's, looking forward each morning to Mr Emory showing me the rats he had trapped in the barn the evening before, saving me his match boxes and Prince Albert tobacco tins to play with. A good carpenter, Mr Emory made me a nice wooden high chair I could use to sit at the kitchen table with. Mrs Mary and we would walk about the yard and collect the eggs the chickens had laid in the barn and under the bushes in the yard. She would then make me my favorite food of all time, her special bread pudding. It had to be the eggs I always assumed, for even to this day, the consistency has never been matched. Maybe the ingredient was nostalgia. Mr Emory was a fiddle player in a band with his first wife Susie that played down at the skating rink across the street on the Sopchoppy river and he liked to rock a horsey me on his foot and sing an old dance hall tune, though I’m not too sure Mrs Mary approved. They had a nice front porch swing under the shady magnolia where I would lazily lay and watch as the occasional car would pass or listen to Mr Burches marching band down at the field practicing. I knew mamma would be coming soon to get me. One morning in 1960, mamma told me I would not be going to Mrs Mary's today. I remember looking out the window in our living room to their house and seeing a hearse. I had never seen one but instinctively knew. That evening mamma and daddy took me over to the house and there Mrs Mary was, lying in wake in the front room in the bed, hands crossed, sleeping it seemed. . It was one of the first death's I had seen, yet somehow I understood at the age of five. Soon after I went to stay with Mrs Willie Mae Porter and her daughters across the street, then the beloved Angeline “Plump” Donaldson, who kept me in our home until we moved to Monticello in 1963. But of all the dear ladies who kept me, none were loved more than Mrs Mary. My heavenly food I know will not be manna but Mrs Mary’s bread pudding.
I've this warped concept
Of one sitting out there
Hanging for dear life
Upon every word
Every scene I bring to her
Famished
Thanking me profusely
For rescuing her
From the rushing stream
Of pablum
But then I see
In reality
She's not reaching for me
It's the damn remote
On the TV
And the walking dead
Is coming on.
It was approximately six on a Thursday
The committee for the Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval
Came knocking
They said according to their criteria
They had awarded us the
Good housekeeping seal of Approval
For being lovers going above and beyond
The call of duty.
The committee quizzically inquired
Is your wife at home?
When it was about that time
From the master bedroom
A voice was heard
Honey, who is it?
That the award was snatched from my hands
Rescinded in an instant moment
The seal upon the door scraped off
The subscription cancelled.
And To think
I was almost a Good Housekeeping lover.
We are mostly bound books
Unread upon the shelves
Your story not interesting
To any but you
And maybe if fortunate
One or two
Possibly your mother
The once lover
But that’s about it
I went in search of
The purple lined composition paper
You once copied out the prose upon
I could only find the
Marbled black and white books
Somehow the prose just wasn’t the
Same written in them
Something was missing
Your long hand
Your long flowing hair
Or so I convinced myself so.
